SEO Werkt!

I’ve had a love affair with Neat scanners for a while now and the company has just updated their roster with two new cloud offerings, the aptly-named NeatCloud and a mobile scanning system called NeatMobile.

For those not in the know, Neat is essentially a scanner for receipts, documents, and business cards. It’s surprisingly fast and efficient and has allowed me, personally, to reduce my paper load considerably. NeatCloud is a fairly simple concept. It’s basically a cloud backup service for Neat documents. The service is a lot like Evernote in that it allows you to save documents via email and grab information on the fly.

NeatMobile is a bit more interesting. Like the Neat scanner, NeatMobile lets you take photos of documents and upload them for instantaneous OCR. If you’re handling a lot of receipts, for example, you can grab shots and send them to the cloud as soon as you get them, rather than running a batch when you get back to the office. Both services offer improved search and filing thanks to server-side algorithms.

Pricing plans range from $5.99 to $24.99 a month. $6 gets you NeatCloud while the other two plans give you access to NeatMobile.

While it will never beat the sound of a few hundred business cards thunking through a Neat scanner, these improvements put Neat in a more interesting position vis a vis the cloud.

GitHub has maintained a long and profitable love affair with all things Apple, but today, the folks behind the most popular code repository site are sullying their allegiance to Cupertino with — get ready to gasp and clutch your pearls — a Windows app.

The reason for the existence of the GitHub desktop app for Windows is easy enough to explain: GitHub users are sometimes also Windows users, and they often find collaborating on code projects to be a pain in the patootie.

“We thought Git was going to get better on its own on a couple other platforms, but it wasn’t advancing … and that’s sort of a shame,” said GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath in a phone conversation with VentureBeat.

“It’s the same situation on enterprise, but even more so — they want to use GitHub, but they’re having a hard time doing so,” he said. And of course, the bootstrapped startup doesn’t want to leave any of that tasty enterprise money on the table, and the enterprise is besotted with Windows.

But, Wanstrath said, the company made the decision primarily for love, not for money. “It was definitely motivated by the trouble people were having,” he told us.

Also, as the small company grows ever larger and as its userbase becomes more diverse, Windows tools are increasingly requested both inside and outside the company. GitHub has grown from a tiny collective of hackers to a 73-person small business, and naturally, some of those 73 folks are Windows enthusiasts.

“Our philosophy is that we wanted [the desktop app] to be by Windows developers for Windows developers,” said Wanstrath. “That’s been our success so far — the things we create, we want to use ourselves.”

That philosophy is part of why it took GitHub so long to roll out its Windows app in the first place: It needed to have the right people who would want to build the app for themselves and eat their own dogfood, to use a rather revolting idiom from the startup ghetto.

“We did the Mac app first because when we first started making desktop apps … we wanted to make something we’d use at the company, and most of the company was Mac users,” said Wanstrath. “We were a lot smaller then.”

The company also wanted to make sure that a desktop app would be used and loved by the community before sinking more resources into multiple applications, he said.

So of course, if you start thinking about platforms hackers love, you start thinking about Linux. But Wanstrath wasn’t ready to commit on that score — not yet, anyhow.

“We can’t really come out on that yet with a yes or no,” he said “but if that’s something people want, if that’s a neeed they have, maybe.”

Over the next few months, expect the Windows desktop app to see the same kind of loving attention and frequent updates the Mac desktop app has had since its launch. Wanstrath promised the Windows app would be maintained as well as the Mac app “if not better.”

“We’ve been growing a pretty serious team to work on this app,” he concluded. “It’s going to be a big part of GitHub.”

Filed under: dev

Posted by Tom Anthony

Google's relationship with links has changed over the last 15 years – it started out as a love affair but nowadays the Facebook status would probably read: "It's Complicated". I think Google are beginning to suffer from trust issues, brought about by well over a decade of the SEO community manipulating the link graph. In this post I'm going to lay out how I think Authorship, and Google+ are one of the ways that Google are trying to remedy this situation.

I'll move on to what that means we should be thinking about doing differently in the future, and am sharing a free link-building tool you can all try out to experiment with these ideas. The tool will allow you to see who is linking to you rather than where is linking to you, and will provide you with social profiles for these authors, as well as details of where else they write.

To start I want to quickly look at a brief history of Google's view of links.

Are links less important than they were?

Back in the early days Google treated all links as being equal. A link in the footer was as good as a link in the main content, a link in bad content was as good as a link in good content, and so on. However, then the new generation of SEOs arrived and started 'optimizing' for links. The black hats created all sorts of problems, but the white hats were also manipulating the link graph. What this meant was now Google had to begin scrutinizing links to decide how trust-worthy they were.

Every link would be examined for various accompanying signals, and it would be weighted according to these signals. It was no longer a case of all links being equal. Reciprocal links began to have a diminished effect, links in footers were also not as powerful, and so it went for a variety of other signals. Over the last decade Google have begun using a wide range of new signals for determining the answer to the question they have to answer for every single link: How much do we trust this link?

They've also introduced an increasing number of signals for evaluating pages beyond the link based signals that made them. If we look at the ranking factors survey results from SEOmoz for 2011 we see that link based factors make up just over 40% of the algorithm. However, in the 2009 survey they were closed to 55% of the algorithm.

So in the last 2 years 15% of the algorithm that was links has been replaced by other signals in relative importance. The results are from a survey, but a survey with people who live and breathe this stuff, and it seems to match up well with what the community as a whole believes, and what we observe with the increasing importance of social signals and the like.

This reduction in the relative power of links seems to imply that Google aren't able to trust links as much as they once did. Whilst clear they are still the backbone of the algorithm, it is clear Google has been constantly searching for other factors to offset the 'over-optimization' that links have suffered from. 

Are social signals the answer?

The SEO community has been talking a lot about social signals the last couple of years, and whether they are going to replace links. I'd argue that social signals can tell you a lot about trust, timeliness, perhaps authority and other factors, but that they are quite limited in terms of relevancy. Google still need the links – they aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

To visualise this point in a different way, if we look at a toy example of the Web Graph. The nodes represent websites (or webpages) and the connections between them as the links between these websites:

And a corresponding toy example of the Social Graph:

We can now visualise Social 'Votes' (be they likes/tweets/+1s/pins or shares of some other type) for different websites. We can see that nodes on the Social Graph send their votes to nodes on the Web Graph:

The Social Graph is sending signals over to the websites. They are basically saying 'Craig likes this site', or 'Rand shared this page'. In other words, the social votes are signals about web sites/pages and not about the links — they don't operate on the graph in the same manner as links.

Whilst social signals do give Google an absolute wealth of information, they don't directly help improve the situation with links and how some links are more trustworthy than others.

Putting the trust back into links

So Google have needed to find a way to provide people with the ability to improve the quality of a link, to verify that links are trust-worthy. I believe that verifying the author of a link is a fantastic way to achieve this, and it fits neatly into the model.

In June last year Google introduced rel author, the method that allows a web page to announce the author of the page by pointing to a Google+ profile page (which has to link back to the site for 2 way verification).

With this model it isn't: 'Distilled linked to SEOmoz' but it is 'Tom Anthony linked on Distilled to Rand Fishkin on SEOmoz'. It's the first time there has been a robust mechanism for this.

This is incredibly powerful for Google as it allows them to do exactly what I mentioned above – they can now verify the author of a web page. This gives 2 advantages:

• Knowing this is an authored link, by a human who they have data about, they can place far more trust in a link. Its likely that a link authored manually by a human is of higher quality, and that a human is unlikely to claim responsibility for a link if it is spammy.
• Furthermore it allows them to change the weighting of links according to the AuthorRank of the author who placed the link.

The latter point is very important, it could impact how links can pass link juice. I believe this will shift the link juice model towards:

I've shown it here as a simple multiplication (and without all the other factors I imagine go into this), but it highlights the main principle: authors with a higher AuthorRank (as determined by both their social standing and by the links coming into their authored pages, I'd imagine):

The base strength of the link still comes from the website, but Rand is a verified author who Google know a lot about and as he a strong online presence, so multiplies the power of links that he authors.

I'm a less well-known author, so don't give as much of a boost to my links as Rand would give. However, I still give links a boost over anonymous authors, because Google now trust me a bit more. They know where else I write, that I'm active in the niche, and socially etc.

Where to Who

So what does all this imply that you do? The obvious things are ensuring that you (and your clients) are using authorship markup, and of course you should try to become trustable in the eyes of Google. However, if you're interested in doing that stuff, you probably were already doing it.

The big thing is that we need a shift in our mindset from where we are getting links from to who we are getting links from. We need to still do the traditional stuff, sure, but we need to ask start thinking about ‘who’ more and more. Of course, we do that some of the time already. Distilled noticed when Seth Godin linked to our Linkbait Guide. I noticed when Bruce Schneier linked to me recently, but we need to begin doing this all in a scalable fashion.

With OpenSiteExplorer, Majestic and many other linkbuilding tools we have a wide array of tools that allow us to look at where we are getting links from in a scalable way.

I hope I've managed to convince you that we need to begin to examine this from the perspective that Google increasingly will be. We need tools for looking at who is linking to who. Here's the thing – all the information we need for this is out there. Let me show you…

Authored links – A data goldmine

We'll examine an example post from GIanluca Fiorelli that he posted in December. Gianluca is using Google's authorship markup to highlight he is the author of this post.

Lets take a look at what information we can pull out from this markup.

The rel author attribute in the HTML source of the page points to his Google+ page, from there we can establish a lot of details about Gianluca:

We can from his Google+ profile establish where Gianluca lives, his bio, where he works etc. We can also get an indicator of his social popularity from the number of Circles that he is in, but also by following examining the other social profiles that he might link to (for example following the link to his Twitter profile and seeing how many Twitter followers he has).

We've talked a lot in the industry in the last couple of years about identifying influencers in a niche, and about building relationships with people. Yet, there is an absolute abundance of information available about authors of links we or our competitors already have — why are we not using it!?!

All of this data can be crawled and gathered automatically, exactly in the way that Google crawls the authorship markup, which allows us to begin thinking about building the scalable sorts of tools I have mentioned. In the absence of any tools, I went right ahead and built one…

AuthorCrawler – A tool for mining Author Data for Linkbuilding

I first unveiled this tool a couple of weeks ago at LinkLove London, but I'm pleased to release it publicly today. (As an aside, if you like getting exclusive access to cool toys like this then you should check out SearchLove San Fran in June or MozCon in July).

AuthorCrawler is a free, open-source tool that pulls the backlinks to a URL, crawls the authorship markup on the page, and gives you a report of who is linking to a URL. It is fully functional, but it is a proof-of-concept tool, and isn't intended to be an extensive or robust solution. However, it does allow us to get started experimenting with this sort of data in a scalable way.

When you run the report, you'll get something similar to this example report (or take a look at the interactive version) I ran for SEOmoz.org:

It pulls the top 1000 backlinks for the homepage, and then crawled each of them looking for authorship markup, which if found is followed to crawl for the authors data (no. Circles, Twitter followers), and very importantly it also pulls the 'Contributes to' field from Google+ so you can see where else this author writes. It might be that you find people linking to your site that also write elsewhere, on maybe more powerful sites, so these are great people to build a relationship with – they are already aware of you, warm to you (they're already linking) and could provide links from other domains.

You can sort the report by the PA/DA of where the link was placed, or by the social follower counts of the authors. You can also click through to the authors Google+ and Twitter profiles to quickly see what they're currently up to.

I'm pretty excited by this sort of report and I think it opens up some creative ideas for new approaches to building both links and relationships. However, I still felt we could take this a little bit further.

I'm sure many of you will know the link intersect tool, in the labs section of SEOmoz. It allows you to enter your URL, and the URLs of other domains in your niche (most likely your competitors, but not necessarily), and it examines the back links to each of these and reports on domains/pages that are linking to multiple domains in your niche. It also reports whether you currently have a link from that page – so you can quickly identify some possible places to target for links. Its a great tool!

So, I took the principle from the link intersect tool and I applied the authorship crawling code to create an Author Intersect tool. It will give you a report that looks like this (you can check the interactive example report also):

Now what you have is really cool – you have a list of people who are writing about your niche, who are possibly linking to your competitors, whose social presence you can also see at a glance. These are great people to reach out to build relationships with – they are primed to link to you!

The tool is pretty simple to use – if you're unsure there is an instructions page on the site to get you started.

Wrap Up

We are in the early days of authorship, but I think Google are going to keep on pushing Google+ hard, and I think authorship's importance is just going to increase. Correspondingly – I think tools such as this re going to become an increasing part of an SEOs toolkit in the next 12 months, and I'm excited to see where it goes.

I've only just begun to dig into the ways we can use tools like these – so I'd love to hear from others what they get up to with it. So go and download the tool and try it out. Have fun!

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Every couple of months, Twitter inches slightly closer to their goal of becoming an advertising force in social media.

This week’s action was pushing Promoted Tweets out to the mobile apps. More importantly, they expanded who sees the ads and that’s great for marketers.

Previously, Promoted Tweets only showed up in your stream if you followed that brand. Now, advertisers can choose to show Tweets to anyone with similar interests.

The way I interpret this is, if I’m following Coca-Cola on Twitter, then Pepsi can choose to send me their Promoted Tweets.

Twitter says they decided to make this move because the response they got to their mobile testing was positive. Will it stay that way?

It does seem that people have stopped carrying on about the presence of advertising. Perhaps they’ve finally realized that it’s not only necessary if they want the app for free, but it can be helpful.

Yes, I said it. Advertising is a good thing. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but perhaps my word will spread to the masses and people will learn to embrace ads, not run from them.

Twitter says 55% of the more than 100 million regular users check in at least once a month using a mobile app. With the upgrades in navigation and presentation, this number should continue to climb.

I had a real love affair with Twitter at the start, then broke away for several months. Now, I’ve found I really enjoy sitting on the couch, flipping through the day’s tweets with my iPad. The app allows me to easily click through to read submitted articles and I feel like I’m getting more out of Twitter than ever before.

How about you? Do you use Twitter on mobile? How does it fit in to your marketing plan?

Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information.

Forget your girlfriend, your mobile phone is fast becoming a better companion in times of crisis — you know, when you need to score the best deal on that sexy gadget or you’ve left your wallet in the car.

New data from Nielsen shows that nearly one-third of U.S. smartphone owners (29 percent) now turn to their devices for shopping dos and don’ts. And our new-found love affair with our phones is so promising, most of us are ready to close the deal — 71 percent of app downloaders said they’d like to use their phone to pay at the register.

Mobile shoppers, according to Nielsen’s U.S. Digital Consumer Report, are most keen on comparison shopping while in stores and browsing products on their devices. During the third quarter of 2011, 38 percent of smartphone owners turned to their cell phone for both activities. Thirty-two percent used their device to read up on product reviews, 24 percent searched for coupons, and 22 percent actually purchased a product from their mobile pal.

While just 9 percent of mobile shoppers indicated that they used their phone to pay at the register (we’d hazard a guess that a majority are Starbucks customers), 71 percent of app downloaders said they were interested in using their smartphone as a credit card. And iPhone owners showed even more interest; 75 percent expressed interest in paying by iPhone, and 39 percent said they would be extremely or very interested in using an app for that purpose.

These high percentages point to a mobile wallet future we’ve all seen coming and suggests that early entrants like Google and PayPal have large opportunities to capitalize on consumers mobile payment desires.

Nielsen’s findings also fall in line with other recent studies, including one from Pew Research Center which found that 52 percent of all adult cell phone owners used their phone for shopping-related activities over the holidays.

The data serves as further evidence that brick-and-mortar shoppers and mobile shoppers are no longer two disparate entities.

Photo credit: Roger’s Wife/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

You know you have a love affair with pizza. Admit it. Now you can enjoy pizza tantalizing pictures of pizza every month of the year with L’asso pizzeria‘s 2012 pizza calendar. For purchase here.

Brilliantly funny local advertising campaign.

Photographed by Ashley Macknica.

I believe in love at first sight site. That is, if it’s possible to fall in love with a website. The first time I visited the TED website, I was in love with the concept: high-quality infotainment featuring world-class speakers—what more could I ask for from media?

Since then, my love affair with TED has grown. I’ve watched as TED has developed a variety of ambitious side projects, such as TEDx events and even TEd conferences. So you can only imagine how excited I was when I visited the TED site last week and discovered a new addition to the TED family: TED conversations!

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What do you need to turn your ideas and thoughts into a reality?

Painting is hard. First, you need the money to buy all of the materials (canvas, brushes, paints, easel, etc…), then you need years of practice to understand the intricate techniques to nurture your spark and flow. All of the arts are like this (I would lump making movies, music, photography and even writing in here). Many of us dabble in art (we create content online – in text, images, audio and video), and while many won’t count this as art (because "many" think of fine art when they think of art), it’s astonishing to think about what technology has truly given us: it is a tremendous gift.

The gift: the ability to create with an unlimited capacity.  

My current love affair with my MacBook Air is well documented. As someone who used to switch computers a few times every year (always wanting something faster, lighter, thinner…), the MacBook Air is – without question – the best laptop I have ever owned. But, it’s more than what it does… it’s how it makes me feel. I look at the laptop and think to myself, if I were a painter, it would be like having every type of canvas, brush, paint and color available to me (and easy to take anywhere and everywhere). Unlimited choices to create.  As something who likes to tinker with words, this MacBook Air offers me unlimited capacity to create words. So yes, technology blows me away.

It’s about more than creation.

It would only be amazing if all I could do was create with unlimited capacity, but I can do more. I can turn those words into a media channel. I can then distribute that media to the world (for free) instantly – as soon as the muse strikes. I can share it with the world… and the world can then engage in the discourse. Yes, there are moments where we should all get a little sentimental about how profound this truly is.

The wall.

What does all of this mean? This unlimited capacity actually breaks down divides. You – as you’re reading this – are formulating your own opinion and it’s going to take shape based on where you live, your culture, your heritage and how that adds a different prism to my very different background. Still, we come together (or agree to disagree) and in a small way, it brings us all closer together.

There is a lesson here.

The lesson here is that everything has changed. It’s not really a MacBook Air that I’m typing on: it’s a tool of change (to steal a turn of phrase from the good people at O’Reilly). It’s not just a way to connect, share and publish, either. It’s a tool that can (and should) kill mediocrity. Just because you can create and publish content, it doesn’t mean that it should be done without care, perspective and passion. Everyone creating content will not result in everybody creating great content. The lesson is about using this power to do something great.

Does that stress you out? 

It should. I get stressed every time I open the lid of the MacBook Air. I hope the words will flow and that the ideas will please our clients at Twist Image. I hope that I will be able to publish something that will make you think, smile or counter-punch. It is not a computer. It is a tool of great power. I tend to fear it much more than I love it.

So, you have this power… now what? what are you going to do about this unlimited capacity?

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The Discovery may have had its last launch with NASA on February 24 of this year. The tech world is just getting started with its own full launch – a love affair complete with predictions, trends,…



[Click on the title to read this article in its entirety at Conversation Agent]